It was revealed this week that a Russian hacker ring has amassed 1.2 billion username and password combinations and more than 500 million e-mail addresses. Editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe suggests that might be good news for some Internet users, while David Fitzsimmons thinks the news reveals something about Russia president Vladimir Putin.

Daniel Ellsberg speaks during a rally in support of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning outside the gates of Fort Meade, Md. On June 10, Ellsberg, the whistleblower responsible for releasing the Pentagon Papers, called the revelations by government contractor Edward Snowden on U.S. secret surveillance programs the most “significant disclosure” in the nation’s history, more important than the Pentagon Papers as well as information given to the anti-secrecy website Wikileaks by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning. (Patrick Semansky, AP File)

By Daniel J. SoloveSpecial to The Washington Post

The disclosure of two secret government surveillance programs — one involving phone records and the other personal data from Internet companies — has sparked debate about privacy and national security. Has the government gone too far? Or not far enough? How much privacy should we sacrifice for security? To discuss these issues productively, some myths must be dispelled.

1. The collection of phone numbers and other “metadata” isn’t much of a threat to privacy.
Don’t worry, argue defenders of these surveillance programs: The government is gathering innocuous data, not intimate secrets. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama declared. Intelligence agencies are “looking at phone numbers and durations of calls; they are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.”

But “metadata” about phone calls can be quite revealing. Whom someone is talking to may be just as sensitive as what’s being said. Calls to doctors or health-care providers can suggest certain medical conditions. Calls to businesses say something about a person’s interests and lifestyle. Calls to friends reveal associations, potentially pointing to someone’s political, religious or philosophical beliefs.
Even when individual calls are innocuous, a detailed phone record can present a telling portrait of the person associated with a telephone number. Collect millions of those records, and there’s the potential to trace the entire country’s social and professional connections.Read more…

A brilliant young man, just 26, Swartz was facing federal felony charges stemming from allegations he hacked into an MIT computer, stealing some 5 million paywall-accessed articles. His intent, authorities said, was to distribute them on file-sharing web sites.

Some called him a “hactivist.” But no doubt, Swartz also was a visionary. He created RSS software when he was just a teenager. In college, he co-founded the web site service Reddit. He was among those who believe the Internet ought to remain an open ecosystem of knowledge.

His life and death shows the deep and evolving divide between those who defend ownership of intellectual property rights and those who think the Internet ought to remain a free-flowing conduit of information.

Vincent Carroll is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. He has been writing commentary on politics and public policy in Colorado since 1982 and was originally with the Rocky Mountain News, where he was also editor of the editorial pages until that newspaper gave up the ghost in 2009.

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To reach the Denver Post editorial page by phone: 303-954-1331

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